Developing a Local Marketing Strategy

Local marketing means making your marketing messages more personal, and reaching out to your customers at the neighborhood level. You are probably already implementing local marketing techniques by talking to local vendors and potential customers in your community. However, to be fully effective, you should develop a concerted local marketing strategy.

Developing your local marketing strategy

Take some time to think about your local area and the people and businesses within it.

1. You need to identify where the majority of your target market is; think about the type of people and businesses that are most likely to buy your products. Pinpoint those regions and focus your local marketing efforts on those regions.
2. Breakdown your target market into distinct groups and develop campaigns to target each group. Consider the general public, local businesses, key stakeholders in the community, events and fairs, and community groups. How will you reach each group? Create a timeline for rolling out your strategies.
3. Include feedback-gaining techniques in your strategy. Use online and offline feedback channels. Without this feedback you won’t be able to fully assess the success of your campaigns.

Having a clear local marketing strategy allows you to think about and better understand your local market; you can focus on the regions where you will be most successful, and gain valuable feedback.

How To Reach Your Target Market

1. Community groups and events. Connect with your local community.

• Research the community groups in your target regions-schools, churches, hospitals, markets, business groups, etc.-and promote your business via these channels.
• Contact these groups and find out how your business can help them: can you partner with another established local business and co-market your products? Can you create a competition or giveaway? Can you run a class on creating your handmade products?
• Find out what their major events are and when they occur. You don’t want to miss their biggest fundraising event of the year because you didn’t do your research

2. Remember your online presence. Make sure your website or blog ranks highly in local search engines.

• Register with local search engines. For example, through Etsy, an online marketplace for selling handmade products, you can register your business for local searches.

• Try to direct local traffic to your site by listing in services like Yahoo! Local, and by creating or claiming your location listing on Google Maps.
• Get external links to your site from other local professionals and associations.
• Blog about local issues.
• Set up a Facebook account and connect to local contacts.
• Include your website, blog, and email address in all your marketing materials.

3. Marketing materials.

• Create a Flickr account, and post photographs of your products featured in the local area.
• Create local distribution lists and create email newsletters to update the community on your business.
• Create a press release when you are participating in a local event.

Local marketing can be extremely powerful, especially for a niche business; it can help you build a loyal customer-base and build your business through word of mouth. By developing and implementing a pre-planned local marketing strategy you will be better able to assess the success of your marketing efforts.

Written by Sarah Davin. © great25.com.